Relative unknown Lucy Ward picked up the Horizon award at the BBC2 Folk Awards for best newcomer and judging by this exuberant show the judges have actually voted for a future star.
Most folk acts tell stories between songs but Lucy takes her patter into a new dimension that is virtually stand up, and coupled with her powerful singing voice, this show suggests this is the year she will make a significant breakthrough.
At this stage in a folk career the set tends to be combination of original songs and standards, but typically Lucy takes a bolder step including contemporary pop songs in her repertoire. Her take on Common People is both witty and moving, and as my mate observed ‘why hasn’t a folk artist covered this before?’ He’s quite right as Cocker’s tale of art school love is really modern folk storytelling.
Returning to the standards she puts in a lusty Maids When You’re Young about the perils of marrying an old man with no faloorum, or spunk as it is known today. Even better is her reading of Mike Waterson’s A Stitch In Time where an abused woman stitches her husband into a sack and knocks his drunken beatings out of him.
But covering old classics is not enough and luckily Lucy proves to a skilful songwriter delivering a selection of the best self penned tunes from her debut album, Adelphi Has to Fly. The more traditional was the tale of Alice In the Bacon Box which chronicles the fall of a woman from her hometown of Derby into the workhouse that was incredibly poignant.
On the singer songwriter tip Julia was an intense lament for lost first love, and suggested she could easily break out of the folk idiom as her tunes are better than Laura Marling’s tedious folk by numbers.
Live music should always be fun and a packed audience at the Trades Club In Hebden Bridge certainly got their money’s worth as Lucy is a natural performer even reading out dating tips from a ’60s teen annual. She closed with a laid back reading of Blur’s Tender that demonstrated her ability to get to the heart of a cover.
It’s probably a mark of Lucy’s progress that BBC2 folk guru Mike Harding turned up to watch, and she proved that she has the star quality needed to justify the Horizon award with the song writing chops to match.